iCE40HX1K-EVB is Open Source Hardware FPGA board made with KiCAD which is now at assembly line and will be for sale next week on our web. This board can be programmed with the first Free and Open Source FPGA toolchain – ICESTORM.

iCE40HX1K-EVB is designed with KiCAD and we continue our series of questions regarding this amazing tool.

You have chance to be among the first to have iCE40HZ1K-EVB!

To participate in the Quiz is enough to re-tweet the Twitter Quiz announcement message.

To double your chances answer the quiz question.

You have time to re-tweet and/or answer until Monday 27th of June.

In Monday we will post the correct answer and ask random.org to generate random number in range then announce the winner and ship the board by post/airmail.

As far as I know, my version of KiCad at very least uses units like X.YYYYYY millimeters, and writes placement into files like this as well. Therefore, I would expect its ability to go down to at least 1/1000000 of millimeter accuracy, which is ONE NANOMETER. However, I haven’t studied source code in great details, therefore one should take this answer with grain of salt, actual processing abilities may vary, this guess based purely on data/units representation.

Dimensions are stored in an signed integer of unit nanometer. That means the maximum possible dimension in Kicad is 2^32 which is approximately 2.14 meters.
The smallest unit in Kicad is there for nanometer.

The EVB looks really interesting, but does it really contain a PLL as the product page says? According to the data sheet the HX1K is listed as having 1 PLL, but with the footnote “1. No PLL available on the 16 WLCSP, 36 ucBGA, 81 csBGA, 84 QFN and 100 VQFP packages.”